Each year Class Central publishes the ranking of the Best Online Courses of All Time, based on thousands of reviews written by learners. We first published the ranking in 2016, and have updated it since (see also 2017, 2018, 2019 editions).

In the 2020 edition of the Best Online Courses of All Time, we increased the number of courses in the list from 100 to 200, drawing on more than 125,000 learner reviews.

And here are the results:

This is not the only ranking Class Central publishes. Here are a few more:

• The 100 Most Popular Courses During the Pandemic
• The 100 Most Popular Online Courses of All Time
• The Best Online Courses of 2019

The Highlights

Here are some quick stats about the 2020 edition of Class Central’s Best Online Courses of All Time ranking.

• The ranking features courses from ~100 universities in 23 countries.
• The country with the most courses is the United States with 78 courses, followed by the UK with 25 courses.
• Coursera is the top course platform with 75 courses, followed by edX (57) and FutureLearn (39).
• The most reviewed course has 22k reviews.
• Here are the universities with the most courses
  • University of Sheffield – 9 courses
  • MIT – 8 courses
  • The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology – 6 courses
  • Stanford University – 6 courses

Methodology

The methodology we used for this ranking is simple. Using thousands of reviews written by our learners, Class Central was able to sort courses by the Bayesian average of their ratings. Then we removed all the courses with fewer than 20 reviews (the low threshold helps smaller providers to compete on quality) and courses that are unlikely to be offered again. If a course has multiple parts, we only included the first part.

Universities and Course platforms are welcome to upload The Best of All Time Ribbon or Banner to their course page. Here are the digital assets:

• Banners and Ribbon Kit for the Best Online Courses of All Time
• Class Central Logos and Screenshots

The full ranking can be found here: The Best Online Courses of All Time